10d • Class Recordings
Open Group Call 1 | Introductions
Class Overview
Welcome to the first Open Group Call. These calls are open to anyone in the community and will run every Thursday from 4-7pm UTC-6.
In this first class, we start by getting to know each other. The group includes longtime members and people joining for the first time, and everyone takes a couple of minutes to share who they are, what they're passionate about, and their experience with non-duality, the understanding that there is one, not two.
Whatever you're building, creating, or healing, the deeper wish is usually the same: peace, freedom, and an end to suffering. Nobody really wants to be bound, trapped, or stuck.
The class explores where that suffering comes from: the belief in separation. Fear, anger, anxiety, judgment, money stress, conflict, and even sickness can often be traced back to the sense that we are cut off from one another and from the whole. These patterns can show up even when we consciously say we believe we're one. When they do, they reveal where the belief still lives beneath the surface, and that's where the work is.
Waking up isn't something you can force. It's closer to surrender than effort. Trying harder inside the dream won't wake you up. What helps is seeing through the belief in separation, which lets you remember your natural state: peaceful, clear, creative, and whole.
Many teachers across traditions point to the same truth, including Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vedanta teachers, and the text A Course in Miracles.
This shift can feel a little shocking, like shackles coming off. Your body and mind may need time to readjust to being free. Along the way, you may notice knowing, gifts, and abilities returning that you had before you learned to believe you were separate.
After this brief introduction by Holly, it turns into introductions.
Introductions
Cole Blouin lives in the East Village in New York and is a musician "in the process of growing as a philosopher." He found Holly through Xander and says his first real experience of non-dual thinking came through her. He read Zen texts, Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Bhagavad Gita in his late teens and early twenties, but back then he was focused more on practical meditating. When he met Holly in late April or early May they did a diagnostic hypnosis session that was "really amazing" and shifted his perspective. For a while he tried to sit with the insight that there is only love and everything is love. Then a lot of life happened and he hasn't been practicing so intentionally, so it is nice to be coming back. He mentions he's getting waves of cold symptoms.
Sarah Clanton lives in Nashville and was in Greenville, South Carolina for her 20th college reunion. She is a singer, songwriter, and cellist who has "always been a deep thinker," which wasn't always encouraged when you ask why your whole life. She is passionate about music and, more deeply, the connection and experience music has given her, including abundance in relationships and the ability to travel. Her world was "busted open" by The Disappearance of the Universe, which Holly recommended, and it felt like all roads led there. She found Xander through Creative Sovereignty on Instagram. A few years ago a message came to her that she had to write an album called The Paradox. She is still figuring it out but feels closer than ever, and thinks the album may be more about non-duality than strictly a paradox. She wants to support that connection and oneness in the communities she builds through music.
Lauren Be is part of Xander's cohort and met Holly through it. She is passionate about creation, which she says is her language for God and for oneness. She sees it through the natural world and through ourselves as one, with the ability to create as our highest expression. She is a multidisciplinary artist working on integrating and articulating her highest expression. She wasn't familiar with the language of non-duality, but had a strong faith upbringing, so it doesn't feel separate from what she knows about her relationship to herself, everyone else, love, God, and creation. She feels language is limiting and vast at the same time, and she values seeing how everyone is expressing the same thing. For her this space brings resonance but also expansion.
Andrew Culler lives in Canada and spends about half his time in Guatemala. He is an artist building a mural business, "painting really big pictures on big walls." At 17 he had a mystical experience that "completely dissolved the veil of everything I thought I knew," and that led to years of seeking. He lived in an ashram in Guatemala where he first learned about non-duality and practiced a lot of meditation and yoga, and he was met with resistance and with his ego. A turning point came while learning with Holly, when he embraced parts work and the Hero's Journey and let go of trying to do it the way other teachers and mystics suggested. He started paying attention to his inner compass and embracing his own creativity. He had been trying to understand God through other traditions and other people's experiences, and when he embraced his own first-person experience of creating and expressing it into the world, "it all clicked." He doesn't feel like he's seeking so much now and is enjoying his life and experiencing a whole lot of love through creation, travel, and time with amazing people.
Luz joined from a public restaurant. She started learning what Holly teaches and it felt "really trippy" to take in at first. She has been craving the bits and pieces she has been able to make sense of, but it has been hard to implement because she has "that squirrel brain." She is excited to be back because it is something she wants, and she feels the community and the consistency will be a huge part of continuing the journey. She was feeling a bit zapped and asked to pass it along early.
Hilery is in Boston and loves "all things health and wellness and holistic modalities," and does a lot of massage work. She describes her career as the first decade about the physical body, the second about mind and body, and this decade about the spiritual, integration, and embodiment. This year has had a strong theme of embodying all the knowledge she has gathered. Day to day she lives a heart-centered life full of love, wonder, and magic, and also grief and loss. With non-duality she describes a constant learning process that began with books and an ashram, with a lot of Vedanta and Buddhism. She says she is not enlightened yet, so there is more work to do, and she's excited to keep planting seeds, meet like-minded people, and see what grows.
Daniela has been studying with Holly for the entire year, since they met in Guatemala where she was introduced to non-duality. It has been ten months but it also feels like a homecoming. It fully resonates, it feels like truth, which is one of the things she is passionate about, and it feels powerful, "the sort of power that comes from knowing who you are." She is passionate about life, about feeling alive in existence, and about waking up.
Julien (Jules) Dean is an artist in many forms, mostly painting at the moment, and he is also making clothes. Whenever he's creating he feels a sense of oneness, "an intuitive dance" of feeling something, being scared to do it, doing it anyway, and being pleasantly surprised. He shares a story about being at a friend's house late at night, hearing about spiritual books, and deciding to take one from his parents' collection when he got home. Walking down the middle of a foggy street "because I said, why not," he saw an open book that had been run over. It was The Power of Now. He sees it as his first little connection with God and the first time he listened to himself. He was introduced to Holly through Xander, has been in Creative Sovereignty since the end of last year, and says the sessions and conversations they've had have resonated very much.
Patrick Cashin lives in Montreal and plays piano. He teaches in a way that integrates classical music, piano playing, movement, and holistic health. He has felt spirituality since a young age through music, even though it wasn't usually talked about explicitly around him, so it has mostly been an individual thing. For the past year and a bit he has been part of Xander's group, trying to bring together the different parts of himself and make things work more naturally by staying in touch with his intuition. He notices interesting synchronicities when he feels aligned. He also has old patterns and stories that keep coming up, and he says it is quite palpable when he's caught in the stories versus when he can let go and feel freedom and flow. He hopes to live more of his life in that state.
Angela has been on a journey of learning with Holly from the beginning. "I thought I was the teacher. Clearly that's not the case. I'm her mother." She has been looking for healing and wholeness. She was clearly creative, or wanted to be, but it "evaporated somewhere," so the search continues. She finds it always interesting and says everything everyone says resonates.
Dave Wenig is in Wyoming and teaches Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He used to be an engineer when he started working with Holly and Dylan in the Earth Pulse container five years and change ago, which was a big transition point in his life. Teachings, reading, experiences, and some plant medicine experiences helped him feel deeply into our connectedness. Lately his favorite way to experience non-duality is through paradox and humor. We are all one and connected, he just knows that, but he also sees a bunch of squares with faces on the call, and both things are true at once. We are also living our individual lives, which he thinks is hilarious and "the humor of God and the universe." He had to jump off because students were arriving for class, and plans to catch up on the replay.
Michael Ellis has considered himself a woodworker, or at least a wannabe, since he was about six. That path has taken him around the world doing construction projects of all kinds. He shares a childhood story about building a model of his uncle's farm in the Midwest where one silo would not stick, and the next year the real silo fell over. He wondered what he had created and then moved on. Later he wanted to be an architect and came back to it about seven years ago. He loved the architect Christopher Alexander, who talks about wholeness and finding the resonance within you that tells you you're on the right track. One of the courses was called Self and Wholeness, which he says was the closest he came to this connection before. He also had a Christian background that seemed to pride itself on a theology of separation, and in recent years he's been discovering that may have been a mistaking of the original intention. Someone brought up fear and love to him, and now he notices when people fall into fear and safety while designing with him and his wife Kelsey, and when they go into love, playing and joyful and giving themselves space to be. The more he embodies what Holly talks about, the more freedom he has to say no to things that don't align, and that has opened up space for an expression he had tucked away and been shy about. He's looking forward to being a little less shy and less protective around it.
Vanessa is passionate about "a lot of things" but more than that, about doing things with passion, love, and joy and being aligned with what brings her joy. Music has been taking a lot of her attention lately. She loves design, spaces, clothing, and making them beautiful, and she is passionate about working with women and understanding the feminine psyche. Above all she is passionate about connecting to the truth, which is why she keeps returning. She has studied with Holly for about two and a half years and has been diligent about showing up, and she was off-camera because she may have worldly tasks to take care of. Before non-duality she explored spirituality and God from a space that didn't always feel peaceful. Now, "if it's not feeling peaceful, it must not be God," and her filter for discerning what's true has become a lot sharper.
Kelsey Ellis has spent the last several years rediscovering that she can be passionate about something. She has been writing and realizing creativity is incredibly important, even in small ways. She tells how she had five minutes in a day that were hers to create, and she felted acorns. She also loves celebrating others in what they are passionate about. When designing spaces with Mike she wants to know what makes people come alive so it can be built into their space to remind them, so they can bring more of themselves to life, which she hopes helps that oneness come together. She thinks her first introduction to non-duality was her fourth and fifth grade teacher, "the embodiment of love walking in this world." For the last several years she has been learning from someone who teaches connection, not separation, and about handing over fear and receiving truth, which she says has been huge. Having done several years of handing over fears, she gets to go even deeper now, "and that's fantastic."
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Open Group Call 1 | Introductions
skool.com/fullspectrum
Diagnosing and resolving the subconscious belief in separation so you can live awake and create from love.
Leaderboard (30-day)
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