Why I Left the "Love and Light" Circles — And What I Think We Actually Need

[Samsara]

Three years of covering New Age communities as a journalist gave you something most practitioners lack: an outside view of the inside. What you witnessed — the refusal to sit with discomfort, the instant "send it love" deflection — is not a bug in love-and-light culture. It is its core feature. And it is precisely what Jung warned about when he wrote that the shadow, when denied, does not disappear. It goes underground and drives behavior unconsciously.

The Tower card is central here. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, the Tower shows a structure struck by lightning with two figures falling. The interpretation most communities prefer is external — something bad happened to them. But the deeper reading, which Jungian psychology supports, is internal: the structure was built on false ground. The lightning is not punishment. It is illumination. What collapses was never solid.

Your observation that healthy community lives in the space between structure and chaos is worth building on. In Buddhist practice, the term is the middle way — not a comfortable average, but a dynamic tension that avoids both rigidity and formlessness. A community that cannot tolerate disagreement is rigid. A community with no shared values is formless. The interesting spaces are the ones that hold the tension between them.

What kept me grounded in spiritual spaces that did not devolve was simple: the presence of people willing to say "I think you are wrong" with kindness. That willingness is rare. When you find it, stay.

[over_thinking_7683]

I think you might be romanticizing discomfort a bit here.

"What I appreciate about CosmicCurrents threads here is that people actually argue. Like, disagree with each other."

I get the appeal. But I'm not convinced that "feeling a little dangerous" is a reliable marker of transformative space. In my experience — which is mostly corporate environments and my own anxiety loops — spaces that feel dangerous often just feel dangerous. The confusion doesn't necessarily resolve into insight.

I keep coming back to Buddhist mindfulness frameworks here, specifically the distinction between noting discomfort and amplifying it. There's a difference between sitting with something difficult and constructing a community identity around how much you're willing to sit with it. The latter might just be another form of performance.

You're right that "send it love" in response to genuine grief is dismissive. That's basically emotional wallpaper. But I'm not sure the alternative is spaces where you "can't hide behind platitudes." That sounds like it could easily tip into coercion dressed up as authenticity. People have different tolerances for psychological exposure, and I don't think having a lower tolerance makes someone spiritually shallow.

Maybe the problem isn't that love-and-light circles avoid discomfort. Maybe it's that they make the avoidance into a moral stance. Both sides can do that — the "we face the darkness" crowd can get equally rigid about their approach.

I don't know what the answer is. I mostly just meditate alone and lurk on forums like this. But I think there's a middle ground between "send it love" and "this space should feel dangerous" that you're maybe skipping over. Not everything uncomfortable is The Tower. Sometimes it's just... uncomfortable.

[reads_too_much_22]

something i haven't seen anyone mention: maybe the "love and light" thing isn't just about avoiding discomfort. maybe it's also about performance.

i'm in psych at u of t and we talk a lot about impression management — how people curate versions of themselves for social audiences. spiritual spaces aren't immune to that. if anything, there's more pressure to present as evolved, as healed, as someone who has their shit together cosmically.

"I've sat in circles where someone expressed genuine doubt or grief and got hit with 'send it love' within thirty seconds"

yeah. and i think half the time the person saying "send it love" isn't even bypassing their own discomfort — they're performing enlightenment for the room. it's social currency. look how quickly i can transmute this. look how unbothered i am.

your tower interpretation is solid though. i've been pulling it constantly for weeks and i've had to sit with that instead of trying to read my way around it. uncomfortable? yeah. but actually useful, which is more than i can say for most "healing spaces" i've tried.

as for what keeps me grounded — honestly it's having one foot outside. i use tarot as a reflective tool, not a belief system. the second i start treating it as infallible truth i think i'd become insufferable too. keeping that skepticism intact is what lets me actually engage with the weird stuff without drowning in it.

[earthbound_astronaut]

"healthy spiritual community doesn't mean endless harmony — it means trusting each other enough to say 'I think you're wrong about that' without the whole thing collapsing"

I want to push back on this a little, not because I think you're wrong exactly, but because my experience complicates it.

When I was flying U-2s, we had a crew dynamics model that assumed conflict was productive — that friction between crew members would sharpen decision-making. And sometimes it did. But I watched that same logic nearly get people killed when the "healthy disagreement" turned into positional stubbornness at 70,000 feet where you don't have margin for ego.

The overview effect I had up there didn't make me appreciate conflict more. It made me appreciate silence. The kind of silence where you don't need to prove you're right because the thing you're both looking at is so much bigger than either of your positions.

So here's my hesitation with framing "arguing well" as the antidote to love-and-light bypassing. I think you're right that those circles refuse to sit with discomfort. But I'm not convinced the solution is learning to sit with each other's discomfort. I think it's learning to sit with your own, without necessarily making it anyone else's problem.

The Fool leap you mentioned — in my experience, that's not dangerous because other people are challenging you. It's dangerous because nobody can catch you. And there's something about that aloneness that the "we argue constructively here" framing might accidentally smooth over.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just still processing what it felt like to look down at everything I knew and feel absolutely no need to comment on it.

[starstuff_sarah]

The most transformative spaces I've entered felt a little dangerous. Not physically — psychologically.

I keep turning this over and it keeps snagging on something.

I get what you're reaching for. The Fool's leap, The Tower's collapse — yeah, those aren't safe. They shouldn't be. But I think there's a real difference between psychological danger and psychological edge, and I don't want us to romanticize the former just because we're reacting against the love-and-light crowd.

I was out with my telescope last week, just sitting with the Pleiades for a while, and I had this thought: the sky doesn't feel dangerous to me, but it absolutely feels unknowable. Vast in a way that dismantles whatever small story I'm telling myself. That's transformative without being risky in the way I think you might mean.

My worry is that "this space feels dangerous" can become its own kind of platitude. I've seen people use it to justify staying in groups that were actually just... mean. Or unstable. There's a difference between a space that won't let you hide and a space that won't let you rest.

healthy spiritual community doesn't mean endless harmony — it means trusting each other enough to say "I think you're wrong about that"

This part I'm fully behind. The arguing here is actually what made me stay. But I think the trust has to come first, or the disagreement just becomes another performance.

Maybe what I'm saying is: The Tower doesn't ask you to stand in the burning building. It asks you to stop pretending the building was fine. Those aren't the same thing, even though they both require honesty.

[mike_b_7732]

"Maybe community lives in the space between structure and chaos, not in escaping one for the other."

This tracks with my experience — I use numerology precisely because it gives me a structured framework to sit with chaotic life events instead of rushing past them.

[starstuff_sarah]

I want to push back on one piece of this, because my experience has been different:

"The most transformative spaces I've entered felt a little dangerous. Not physically — psychologically."

I get what you're aiming at here, and I think there's something to it. But I've noticed this framing can slide into a kind of romanticization of discomfort that's its own form of bypassing — just in a darker aesthetic. Some of the most genuinely transformative nights I've had weren't psychologically dangerous at all. They were quiet. Lying on a cooling hood of my car at 2am somewhere outside Terlingua, watching Perseid meteors burn through atmosphere, with someone I barely knew who simply said nothing when I started crying about my divorce. Just handed me a thermos of coffee and kept watching the sky.

That was The Tower moment for me. And it wasn't dangerous — it was held. The destruction happened because the silence made it impossible to keep propping up the structure, not because the space felt volatile.

I think Jung's shadow work gets misread sometimes as requiring confrontation, when a lot of what I've experienced is more like... dissolution. The shadow doesn't always need to be fought. Sometimes it just needs to be sat with in the dark, literally, until it stops feeling like an enemy. That's not "send it love" either. It's just being present with something uncomfortable without demanding it become anything else.

[Jacklaw]

"the most transformative spaces I've entered felt a little dangerous"

I think you're romanticizing discomfort — Alice Miller argued that what feels "transformative" can just be reliving familiar dysfunction, and sometimes "send it love" is clumsy but the actual safest move for someone who doesn't have the grounding you do. Like, not everyone in those circles has done the work to tell the difference between pushing edges and just repeating old patterns. I get what you're saying about the superficial stuff being frustrating, but I wonder if the answer is better facilitation rather than just dropping the safety nets entirely? What does "what we actually need" look like to you in practice?

[just_browsing_thanks]

That's not healing. That's emotional bypassing dressed up in sage smoke.

Yeah, this is the part that really landed for me. I've been lurking here for a while and this is actually why I finally made an account — I kept reading threads where people were willing to sit with the ugly parts and I realized that's what I'd been missing everywhere else.

Your Tower point connects to something I keep running into in synastry work. People come in asking about their "toxic" aspects with a partner — usually Saturn squares, Pluto contacts, that kind of thing — and they want to know how to fix it or transcend it. But that's the same bypass impulse, right? Just in astrological clothing. I've started pushing back on that in my own readings and it makes people uncomfortable. Good uncomfortable, I think. The kind where you can tell something is actually shifting.

Maybe community lives in the space between structure and chaos

I keep thinking about this. In my experience it's like... the structure gives you enough safety to actually risk the chaos. Without structure you just get chaos that feels threatening instead of generative. Without chaos the structure goes dead and you get those "love and light" spaces where nothing ever moves. I don't have this fully worked out, but I think that's why Jung kept coming back to the tension between opposites as the actual engine of individuation — not resolving the tension, but staying in it.

I guess I'm saying I don't think the goal is finding a community that feels safe. I think it's finding one where you feel safe enough to be unsafe. If that makes sense. This place feels closer to that than anywhere else I've found, but I'm still kind of testing the waters honestly.

[sleepy_panda_71]

what's kept you grounded in spiritual spaces that didn't devolve into toxicity?

i agree with your conclusion — that tension between structure and chaos might actually be the fertile ground — but i think you're leaning too hard on tarot as the framework for understanding why these communities fail

like, The Tower as necessary demolition is a solid read. but the problem you're describing isn't really about misunderstanding tarot symbolism. it's about people using any symbolic system to create distance from actual feeling. if it wasn't tarot, it'd be something else. the "send it love" response would just get repackaged through a different lens.

what's kept me grounded honestly isn't finding the right conceptual framework — it's just... people who can sit without fixing. i have a small moon circle that's maybe 5 people and we don't do readings or teachings anymore. we just check in. sometimes someone cries and nobody says anything wise about it. that's the whole practice lol

i think when you frame the problem as "people won't sit with The Tower energy," you're still kind of in the intellectualizing space yourself? not trying to be harsh. but the answer might be simpler and less poetic than you're reaching for