I’ll be honest: I clicked it out of grad-school procrastination. My daily sit usually involves staring at a wall and remembering I’m a veteran with a nervous system that still flinches at car backfiring. The PTSD doesn’t just pack up and leave. The legal psychedelic trials I went through a few years back gave me a neurological reset, sure, but they didn’t hand me a maintenance manual. I needed structure. Not the flowery “align your chakras” stuff, just raw mechanics.

And that’s the weird part. Those cheap online platforms strip away the mysticism and accidentally land right on the bones of ancient practice. They’re teaching exposure, habituation, and non-reactivity. Carl Jung wrote extensively about disciplined attention as a way to integrate the unconscious. The modern platforms just call it “day 7: watching thoughts pass like clouds.” It’s the same damn circuitry. I think what nobody in traditional meditation circles wants to admit is that lineage doesn’t have a monopoly on the actual mechanics. The robes, the Sanskrit, the lineage certificates—they’re beautiful. But the engine runs on repetition and showing up when you’d rather doomscroll.

Tarot’s been saying this for centuries, too. You pull The Hermit and you’re not suddenly granted cosmic wisdom. You’re just told to withdraw, shut up, and do the inner work. The modern “Udemy approach” is basically Hermit energy with a completion percentage. I’m not saying it replaces deep traditional study or the guidance of a real teacher. I’m just saying it’s validating what the old texts already knew: consciousness isn’t unlocked by buying the right incense. It’s trained.

Anyone else stumbled into a completely secular, almost corporate-feeling practice that accidentally mirrored something ancient? Or am I just over-romanticizing a subscription model?

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Earthing (Grounding): Walking Barefoot, Science, and Skepticism | Mystic Wiki.)