Lighting The Fire

Reflections on the early days of community building

Stepping Stones

I’ve spent years thinking about and planning the creation of a transformational community.

Scribbling blueprints. Drafting manifestos. Visualizing the vision.

Trying to figure out who the community was for and what value it would provide.

In retrospect, I realize how much of that thinking and planning was a way to manage the uncertainty of creating something I had no idea how to build—or was too scared to start.

And while there was a lot of dreaming, there were also actions I took that I now see as stepping stones toward this community.

Hosting personal growth meetups. Participating in facilitator trainings. Creating a podcast.

In some way, all of these activities were early expressions of the same impulse: the desire to steward community.

The First Sparks

This year, it felt like the vision was ready to be born.

I started connecting with more people through one-on-one Zoom calls.

I settled on WhatsApp as the group chat space for the community and began inviting many of the people I had connected with.

So far, I’ve hosted one community practice session and two community coherence calls.

Both of those coherence calls gave me a glimpse of what I’ve been longing to be a part of:

• Intellect in service of the heart

• Individuals connected to a whole

• Diversity within unity

• Vulnerability and depth

• Trust in uncertainty and not knowing

Even in these early moments, I can feel something significant coming together.

Beyond me and my content

For a while, I’ve been stuck in my head because I thought I had to figure this out on my own.

Now I recognize that while I may play a disproportionate role as the steward , what this community wants to become extends far beyond me.

Over the years, I’ve seen many creators build communities around the content they produce.

The trajectory often looks something like this: create content → build a following → launch a subscription-based membership community.

While content can act as a broadcast signal—attracting people who resonate with similar perspectives and ideas—it is not enough to create genuine connection.

Some of the people in this community are listeners and supporters of my podcast, yet what is most valuable here is not the content I produce but what emerges between us.

I’m not bringing together passive consumers of content.

I’m gathering engaged collaborators—people willing to participate in the co-creation of articles, podcasts, practice sessions, and the broader process of weaving connection, coherence, and community.

Relationships are the foundations of community, and they aren’t built through content creation alone.

Birth, Death, and Lighting Fires

For a long time, when I imagined launching this community, I pictured a baby that wasn’t quite ready to be born.

Now the internal vision has begun to move into the external world, but it is still in gestation.

This is a sensitive phase.

There is a small flame now that will either grow into a full-fledged fire or fizzle out.

I choose to trust either possibility because even the biggest fires eventually come to completion.

And in knowing this, I still intend to spend my life lighting fires.

Rooting Liminal Web Explorers

The place online where I have felt most at home is what many call the Liminal Web.

It’s safe to say that most Insighter members are part of this broader movement.

What attracted many of us to the Liminal Web and adjacent spaces is that they are, in fact, liminal spaces—cracks between worlds.

They allow us to experiment with identities and ways of being that are rarely visible in the conventional world.

And while liminality is essential for transformation, we can also get stuck there.

We can spend years endlessly pursuing perspectives and ideas—like restless spirits wandering the bardo.

At some point, we must begin discerning which ideas, perspectives, and ways of being are most worth embodying.

Modern culture has left many of us uprooted—disconnected from ourselves, from nature, and from each other.

And while one of the central questions of the Liminal Web has been how do we move beyond modernity, these spaces haven’t exactly helped us step outside of liminality and into rootedness.

I’ve met dozens of fascinating people through the Liminal Web.

But most of those connections were one-offs.

What I long for now is something different.

Relationships rooted in continuity, coherence, and trust.

A space where we help each other actualize our highest visions.

It seems that many of those drawn to Insighter share that same longing.

Structure and Purpose

It’s impossible to talk about community without talking about structure.

The question becomes: what kinds of structures are most generative for creating the community we desire?

Many communities within the Liminal Web have struggled because they couldn’t create a sustainable structure—something flexible enough to adapt and sturdy enough to weather the storms of chaos.

A community for everyone is a community for no one.

A community where everything goes, goes nowhere.

As I write this, I notice the nondual sentiment in these statements, illuminating the constructed nature of both self and community.

And like monks weaving sand mandalas, there is both skill and beauty in the act of constructing.

This capacity to construct skillfully reminds me of Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma teachings, which, from the ground of emptiness, invite us into the reimagining of reality.

It is precisely because everything is empty that there is such vast possibility to create, transform, and weave beauty in the world.

So what do we want to create?

What possibilities do we want to actualize?

What ways of being do we want to embody?

And what is our purpose in coming together?

A sincerely ironic ethos

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