Energetic Rape Culture in Conscious Communities

CNN recently exposed a website hosting over 20,000 videos of women being assaulted while unconscious, and a private community teaching men how to drug and rape women. The site had 62 million views in February.

If you consider yourself spiritual, it’s easy to blame the dark corners of the internet for this.

But I want to shed light on this in a way that supports actual change, even if it may be hard to take in.

The energetics that create this culture are alive and well in the conscious community too.

And it’s happening on the ecstatic dance floor. In the cacao ceremonies. In the Tantra scene. Everywhere.

I’ve been living in these communities for more than 7 years (Bali, Maui, Tulum, and others), and what I’ve witnessed is uncomfortable.

We didn’t leave predatory culture behind when we left the bars and clubs: we brought it with us.

The predatory energy is still here. It’s just gotten smarter, sneakier, and better at saying the right things.

It knows how to talk about trauma. It knows how to use words like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘sacred’. It shows up to workshops, sits in medicine circles, and offers nervous system regulation.

And because it’s wearing the ‘right clothes’ and speaking the ‘right language,’ it’s actually harder to spot than the drunk guy at the bar who doesn’t know any better.

For example, when I look around at ecstatic dance in Bali, I see a large percentage of the men energetically raping those around them (and women participating in the dynamic too).

Not physically. Energetically. And most of them have no idea they’re doing it.

So what is energetic rape?

It’s the uninvited penetration of someone’s field. The feeding off of another’s life force, energy, attention, or longing, without the capacity or willingness to hold responsibility for what was opened.

It’s using another person’s energy field to stabilize one’s own nervous system, without their full acknowledgment or consent.

It doesn’t require touch or words.

It happens in a look that hooks rather than meets. In a presence that extracts rather than exchanges. In the subtle, but unmistakable, feeling of being fed on.

If you’ve spent time in these communities, you know this feeling. You’ve felt the ‘ick’ or the lingering film of dense energy after an event that you just couldn’t shake.

So what’s the root for why this is such an epidemic, even in the spaces that are supposed to ‘know better?’

Not evil. Pain. Unprocessed pain.

Pain that wasn’t felt because there wasn’t enough nervous system capacity to hold it. So it became common and normalized.

The energetic mechanics are actually very simple to understand...

Every human learns to stabilize their nervous system and feel safe in their body through their first experience of the feminine:

The Mother.

Not the woman necessarily, but the feminine principle of The Mother. Warmth, presence, attunement, nourishment. This is how we all learn what safety feels like in a physical body.

For women, there’s a natural developmental process during puberty where this connection transfers from Mother to Self.

The rite of passage of her first bleed is an initiation into her own feminine power, where she starts sourcing that stabilization from within and begins to develop her own connection to life force.

For men, it doesn’t happen automatically, so some never go through this initiation, ever.

Without an active rite of passage to intentionally sever the energetic umbilical cord from Mother to Son, a man doesn’t learn to feel safe in his own body without the feminine.

So he keeps seeking her, often compulsively. Through women’s bodies, seduction, longing, the chaos of romantic triangles, porn…

The man who does this isn’t inherently evil. He just has a nervous system that never learned another way to feel safe.

This is the energetic root of rape culture.

From violence to subtler addictions, it’s all the same root of unprocessed pain and a nervous system seeking stabilization, because it never learned to find it on its own.

And because feeling the pain is so painful, most men avoid it at all costs.

They don't want to trace it back to its origin or sit in the shame of what they've done. That is far too confronting for a nervous system that can't hold itself.

So it runs. To the next fix. The next woman. The next website. The next substance. Anything not to face it.

That’s how pain turns to avoidance.
And avoidance to addiction.
And addiction to predation.

But at a certain point, it isn’t unconscious anymore.

When he can feel what he’s doing, see the pattern, and know he’s taking more than he’s willing to hold, then continuing past that point… is a choice.

So we have men like:

• The sensual massage practitioner offering y/ni massages with mixed messages, convincing himself (and others) that he’s a ‘healer.’
• The contact dancer throwing women around like they’re his objects to play with and then dropping them for the next one whenever he chooses.
• The lover who opens a woman’s heart just enough to feel real, and withdraws before actual responsibility is required.

You know these men. We all do.

But this epidemic has two sides.

Because for every man sourcing his safety through the feminine, there’s a woman offering it willingly.

She’s not to blame, and her participation does not justify what is done with it.

But she learned (probably very young) that being needed is how she stays safe. That mothering, healing, holding, fixing is where her value is.

So she keeps showing up for men who aren’t ready, pouring her love into them, hoping they’ll change.

But as long as she’s playing The Mother, she is unintentionally enabling the pattern that’s harming her.

And although that may be confronting, it’s also empowering. Because when she realizes she is responsible for her part, then she has the power to change it.

So what actually breaks this whole cycle?

Real sovereignty.

Being fully self-sourced.

For men, this means building an internal connection to his own life force, feeling his pain, facing his shame, and reclaiming his integrity on the other side.

For women, this means recognizing her value from within, loving without self-abandoning, and only opening herself to a partner who is ready to meet her.

We’re in a global reckoning with the ugly underbelly of our culture. These shadows are surfacing so we can reclaim our power.

We’re in this together.

Healing on a collective level requires real accountability, and real work, from each of us individually.

If you’re feeling a lot right now, that means something’s moving. If you let it move all the way through you, it can bring you home.

Home to yourself, home to sovereignty, home to integrity and devotion.

Home to the foundations of real love.

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This article was originally shared on Facebook.