I keep seeing the same story. Someone does the work as we like to say. Therapy, a retreat, a teacher, reconnection with their religion, a book they finally read the right way at the right time. Something in them cracks open and for a while the crack is the whole world. There’s a mistake made here - they move in.
You know them. Everything is now above them or beneath them. Their parent’s are toxic. Food is evil. The friend who used to complain about her commute as her main conversation topic is now explaining how she’s “unavailable for low vibrations.” The man who found a men’s group is suddenly too evolved for his own family’s Thanksgiving table. It’s more often than not new age or therapy that this happens in but it can even be culty workouts - the yoga or cross-fit families.
Spaciousness doesn’t mean automatic freedom. It’s more like the possibility of freedom. But so often people simply create a new ceiling and a new floor, and they built a room between the two, and they start living there full time.
This is a lonely address.
From that room, the people who haven’t cracked open look small and slow and a little embarrassing, the way your hometown looks small when you are in your 20’s and comparing it to a TV show.
And because the room is so lonely, it is porous.
The same opening that lets in God or consciousness or internal awareness… also lets in the man selling a twelve week program to fix your nervous system for four thousand dollars, and the teacher who starts hinting that your resistance is proof you need more of her. The partner that threatens to leave you and simultaneously tells you how special you are to the point of total confusion. The therapist that turns you on everyone by helping you label them to the point your own issues become invisible to you.
Grifters don’t kick down doors.
They walk through the ones you left open. Grifters in their own minds, are just in the right place at the right time. They believe on some level they are selling you what you need, which is why the incursion is so easy to miss.
Every tradition that has lasted more than a generation has a story about this exact hallway.
The people wandering after Egypt got impatient waiting on the mountain and melted their jewelry into a calf, because forty days of not knowing felt worse than the certainty of something to worship, even a false one.
The man in the desert was offered kingdoms in the space between his vision and his ministry.
The Buddhists have a name for the false peace that shows up right when you start meditating seriously, a state so pleasant you mistake it for arrival and stop walking.
The Sufis warn about the nafs dressing up as the soul once you get close enough to something real, so that your own ego starts speaking in the voice of your teacher.
Nobody who actually walked this road forgot to mention the hallway.
Awakening is real. I believe there are many paths to conscious living - none of them cause you to look down on anyone else. None of them push you into casual sex or a fake sense of power either. Those are just traps of the hallway.
The hallway was never the house. It was a small, natural landing between two flights of stairs. A grief. A short winter.
You were supposed to be there for a few weeks. Long enough to lose your grip on the old floor and find your footing on the next one. Not long enough to hang curtains.
The falling away is only unbearable if nothing is coming to replace it fast enough.
When the thing you actually asked for is moving toward you at the speed it’s supposed to move, you don’t have time to stand still and get grifted, you’re too busy meeting the new one. That’s how the current under things moves when it isn’t being fought. Quick, almost rude in its speed. It can be disorienting. You are vulnerable.
The disorientation people describe, the stuckness, the slow rot of a false sense of superiority… none of that is transformation.
It’s a detour, mistaken for the destination.
And this internet wellness and therapy culture is built to keep you on the landing. It needs you disoriented and reaching and annoyed and burnt-out, because a person who is reaching will buy almost anything you hand them. Sex sold back to you as liberation, money sold back to you as safety, status sold back to you as belonging, youth sold back to you in a $200 jar.
Even the word freedom gets repackaged and sold to you as one more thing to acquire, one more program, one more identity to graduate into, when the whole appeal of freedom was supposed to be that it can’t be bought. You end up enslaved to the idea of being unenslaved.
It’s the oldest trick there is. It’s in every ancient text we know of.
The people I know who got through the landing fastest weren’t the ones who intellectualized it or reveled in it.
They were the ones who kept walking even while they were disoriented, who treated the crack in the floor as a place to step over, not move into.
They didn’t announce their evolution.
They just kept living, sometimes badly and unevenly, until the next floor showed up under their feet.
Nobody throws a party for the version of you that didn’t stall out on the stairs.
But that’s the one who made it home.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.